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Widows and Suitors in Early Modern English Comedy

The courtship and remarriage of a rich widow was a popular motif in early modern comic theatre. Jennifer Panek brings together a wide variety of texts, from ballads and jest-books to sermons and court records, to examine the staple widow of comedy in her cultural context and to examine early modern attitudes to remarriage. She persuasively challenges the critical tendency to see the stereotype of the lusty widow as a tactic to dissuade women from second marriages, arguing instead that it was deployed to enable her suitors to regain their masculinity, under threat from the dominant, wealthier widow. The theatre, as demonstrated by Middleton, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher and others, was the prime purveyor of a fantasy in which a young man's sexual mastery of a widow allowed him to seize the economic opportunity she offered.

The financial difficulties of“young beginners” led the London aldermen in1556to
pass an act prohibiting apprentices from gaining the freedom of the city until the
age of twenty-four, partly in an attempt to prevent “the overhasty marriages and
oversoon setting up ofhouseholds of and by the youth and young folks of the said
city . . . [who] marry themselves as soon as ever they come out of their
apprenticehood, be they never so young and unskilful.” Such marriages led to
children on ...